Defending Socialism: Deconstructing the "Communism Killed 100 Million" Lie (podcast)

An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950–80 (study)

Revisiting Alleged 30 Million Famine Deaths during China’s Great Leap (article) (article)

Famines in China Pre-PRC:

• 1907 Great Qing Famine — 25 million dead
• 1920–1921 North China famine — 0.5 million dead
• 1928–1930 Chinese famine — 3 million dead
• 1936–1937 famine — 5 million dead
• 1942–1943 famine — 2.5 million dead

If the person in question is open to reading, they can get through Blackshirts and Reds in a day. Probably not what you're after tho

The Black Book of Communism was written by a bunch of people, one of which was so hellbent on achieving a certain sensational number that even his co-authors tried to distance themselves from his “findings”

The winds of history blow without mercy. Is it your path to become the wind, or merely to feel it sweep across your face?

Blackshirts and Reds was the book that started shaking my ideas on this.

I personally like the Hakim video flipping the script and analyzing the capitalist death toll by similar metrics. https://youtu.be/ClLKm8Q8Pns?si=Er9qEBq9OPllYSDB

Honestly anything that dunks on the black book of communism would probably be good.

If you define what it means to kill very carefully and what it means for those leaders to be responsible very carefully, you can make those numbers real. Lots of people died in Russia and China. Lots of people died the world over, too.

The first thing I'd point out is that their methodologies are so ridiculous that they count invading genocidal Nazi soldiers in those numbers. Not only that, they include the Soviet soldiers that died defending against them! There are obvious absurdities there for which you'll want to spell out the meaning: the sources are by charlatans. People that are full of shit, who made careers out of lying in the right way.

Then I'd offer resources to break it down further. For example, it's always surprising to liberals when you bring up a comparison to other countries. This is useful because you can challenge the key issue: what level of death is your normalized baseline for every other country and leader? Why pick out those two and not compare to... the rest? These are very basic questions that libs don't even think about because they've adopted thought patterns that accept anticommunist narratives without prompting any amount of critical engagement.

List the methodologies and ask them to (1) evaluate whether they're fair in the first place and (2) see whether it's possible to apply it to other countries like India or Brazil or Nigeria.

In terms of resources, I recommend two resources in addition to those already mentioned in this thread. The first is Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. It helps provide perspective. The second is Amartya Sen's calculations of excess mortality in India, particularly comparing it to China: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Sen2006.pdf

Sen is useful because he is excessively liberal and literally the only thing he's doing is saying, "okay let's just try to calculate one thing between the two". The result is about 4 million deaths per year in India that are prevented in China. This means capitalist India racks up the full 100 million from this one statistic alone every 25 years. And this is using much fairer methodology than the babies that whine about Mao as if he was a vicious tyrant. The professional liars peddling that nonsense even count unborn babies in their stats, saying that if people decided to not have a baby during hard times, that's someone killed by Mao and communism.

Basically... your audience needs perspective. The deaths normalized under capitalism are all around us, they're just... normalized. We just saw a worldwide pandemic get normalized by capital that forced everyone to work in unsafe conditions, prioritized withholding vaccines for profits, and is trying to get everyone to pretend it isn't still raging. There are various stats out there, but basically every COVID death could have been prevented by prioritizing public health over the whims of the owners of industry. Tens of millions. China did it. Likely saved millions right off the bat.

I'd ask the liberals if they're going to deduct the people saved off of China's "killed" list and put the COVID deaths on capital's. Or have they normalized it as if being propagandized and forced to go to unsafe workplaces are just acts of God? What else is normalized?

Can we use any word other than “gorillion” please

i'd ask what's actually included in that number because usually they bill eastern front WWII deaths to the USSR which is obviously wrong and gives the plot away.

Will you send that to me as well? Because that particular brain worm is hard to squash tbh.

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-the-soviet-union-repress-and-kill-millions-of-people
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
Socialism FAQs on GotHub [nitter for GitHub (less readable but better privacy)]

If the person isnt going to spend time with actual research but also isn't fully bought into the 100 bajillion thing pointing out that that number includes all combat deaths on both sides for all of world War II is the most efficient way to show the numbers bullshit without having to show specific academic articles.

Plus if the person says that makes sense it's a decent way to learn early nor to waste your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKm8Q8Pns&t=683s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjwL1mSrPLA&t=103s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V45ph4DucJk https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md